


vessel

by sundermount



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Blood, Blood Sacrifices, During Timeskip (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 04:34:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28539672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sundermount/pseuds/sundermount
Summary: One drop of blood for every year of Dimitri’s birth.
Kudos: 25





	vessel

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by [one of V’s comments](https://twitter.com/bumblevetr/status/1345869128503091201?s=21) on her [gorgeous art of Felix](https://twitter.com/bumblevetr/status/1345850166344093696?s=21)

_“Chivalry begets the worship and glorification of death. Am i alone in finding that grotesque?”_

Felix stands above an empty resting spot in the Blaiddyd tombs, dagger unsheathed.

 _And yet you are here anyway,_ he thinks, bitterly.

The sharp of the dagger cuts into the meat of his palm; Felix does not wince. He has suffered worse. Even if he had not, he is more than used to this.

He turns his palm, holds it over cold, damp stone. Blood wells from the cut he’s made, and it drips and lands in where Dimitri will one day rest, almost black by whatever little light he is afforded.

One. Two. Three.

_Drip, drip, drip._

The flow of blood slows, and Felix presses at the flesh near the cut. His teeth bite into his lip at the pain, but he just presses harder. The slowing trickle is renewed.

Ten, twelve, thirteen.

Felix knows he was a loved child. Is? He hesitates, stumbles; shakes the thought from his head. But the fact exists that he had a warm, happy childhood, even if he was hastily conceived and born partly of necessity.

(Glenn’s blood didn’t take. The royal pregnancy was a difficult one that, Felix will only find out later on, took too much of Dimitri’s mother.)

Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.

Felix can feel the magic taking, an otherworldly calm settling over him. He stares into the enclosure. One drop of his own blood for every single year of Dimitri’s birth, from the moment he’d been born.

His mother didn’t even get to hold her child. She’d delivered him in Fhirdiad itself, and her newborn babe was immediately carried off into the royal tombs to be bled. A prick of a needle, one single drop of blood for Dimitri’s first year.

Eighteen, nineteen, twenty.

His own father’s blood was still not enough to prevent Lambert’s death. What good is blood magic, their blood _sacrifice_ , if it cannot even do what it was meant to?

 _Dilution of magic_ , his father explains. _From when I had to split mine between Lambert and Dimitri. A minor crest is only enough to sustain one person at a time. But your blood, Felix—it was enough to bring Dimitri back to us._

 _A convenient excuse,_ Felix had spat later on, when he’d fought with his father. The initial argument from which it’d sprang, he does not even remember now.

He’d been risking his own neck in the thick of war and winter for the past two years, stealing into Fhirdiad every third week of the Ethereal Moon for something he doesn’t even know if he still _believes_ in.

 _And yet you still cannot bear to risk it, can you?_ , a nasty voice in the back of his head snarls tauntingly.

Twenty-one.

“Happy birthday, Dimitri,” Felix whispers.


End file.
